April 9, NY Times,Restoration on the Half ShellTHIS year marks 400 years since the founding of the Jamestown colony, a span in which everything about the area has changed, not least the water. When John Smith first encountered the Chesapeake, he was struck by its beauty and bounty. “Heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation,” he wrote. The water was clear, fish teemed in its depths, and oysters lay “as thick as stones” on the bottom....

May 5, Washington Post,R.I. Shellfish Offer Clue to Health of ChesapeakeAlthough 4.5 billion creatures died, the whole thing might have gone unnoticed, except for a couple of Brown University ecologists who dived to the bottom of Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay in the summer of 2001. There they found acres of blue mussels, suffocated by pollution-related oxygen loss in the bay waters...